Communication Efficient Distributed Agnostic Boosting

Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, PMLR 51:1299-1307, 2016.

Abstract

We consider the problem of learning from distributed data in the agnostic setting, i.e., in the presence of arbitrary forms of noise. Our main contribution is a general distributed boosting-based procedure for learning an arbitrary concept space, that is simultaneously noise tolerant, communication efficient, and computationally efficient. This improves significantly over prior works that were either communication efficient only in noise-free scenarios or computationally prohibitive. Empirical results on large synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed approach.